


In Our Bedroom After The War

by airdeari



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Male My Unit | Byleth, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:35:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22617229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: A treatise on what to do with oneself after winning a war and therefore experiencing existential crises such as:• the responsibilities inherent in emerging the victor of a multinational battle to the death,• the physical and emotional consequences on the human body after prolonged combat,• loss of purpose due to the lack of an extrinsic goal, and• running dry of reasons to continue avoiding and compartmentalizing one's feelings towards one's friends, both living and dead,explained by way of parables drawn from the lived experiences of the Kingdom generals immediately following the death of Emperor Edelgard at the Battle of Enbarr.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Mercedes von Martritz, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Dedue Molinaro, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth, Dimitri Has Two Hands (But One Eye), Dorothea Arnault/Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 14
Kudos: 100





	1. The End

**Author's Note:**

> First foray into Fire Emblem fanfiction, hope you all enjoy.
> 
> (shout-out to the other fic out there that also lifts its title from the Stars song In Our Bedroom After The War which I looked up out of curiosity to see how many people had done this title already, and from the tags and summary it looks like we are on the same exact wavelength, I'm saluting the heck out of you and your taste)

It was good that Dimitri dropped the dagger to the floor and left both it and Edelgard herself behind without sparing them a backward glance. He had a chance in that pause while Byleth pushed open the door, and he started to take it, to turn towards the last shreds of his past once bright as a flame and now black as char—but with a gentle tug on his hand, and a squeeze of solidarity, Byleth led him out of the throne room.

It was not good that, in order to leave the dagger behind, Dimitri had to pull it out of his chest.

Once upon a time, in her soft, soothing voice, Rhea had told Byleth that she sensed in him a talent for faith magic. He had let her kindle that talent to keep her pleased, figuring it was not his, but Sothis’s potential she saw. Her efforts from that time long ago had left him with a few weak spells to press into the bloody gash under Dimitri’s shoulder. Dimitri only blinked his glazed eye as a bit of magic settled into him. He still made that quiet, glottal exhale every other step, a sound between a grunt of pain and a cough from blood slowly seeping into his lung.

Of the shouts and bright lights that spilled in through the doorway from the throne room, the first soldier to cut through the din was an armored fright, the bloodstains coloring him the same dark red of the imperial soldiers. But the scarf around his collar, and the speed at which he rushed to His Highness’s side, made him Dedue.

“I’m alright,” Dimitri said tightly, at the same time that Byleth said, “He’s been wounded.”

For all that Byleth worried for Dedue, for the way he gave himself so completely to his charge that he had nothing left to make a self, he handled himself perhaps better than anyone else in times of crisis. Byleth once thought him emotionless, just like he himself had once been. On the contrary, Dedue had a burning heart; rather than let the fire overtake him when the flames grew too strong, he turned it to fuel. Imperial reinforcements, sighting the bold blue and black of the Kingdom’s heir and the green hair of its most powerful general, closed in from all sides. Dedue squared himself in front of his liege, axe braced in his arms, seething heat and purpose.

With his uninjured arm, Dimitri pressed a hand into Dedue’s shoulder. Though they had the unity of spirit such that Dedue knew this was a request to stand down, he did not. Byleth, too, had his hand on the Creator Sword, and a menacing look in his eyes to any who would approach.

“Citizens of Enbarr,” Dimitri bellowed to the hall. “Soldiers of the Empire. Your emperor has fallen.”

The steps of the straggling survivors stuttered and stalled. The air in the room grew thinner from their sharp inhales.

“I respected your emperor,” said Dimitri, limping around Dedue to face his opponents. “I loved her. I know that you believe in the world that she stood for, and I, too, want to see the world that she believed in. One where a person’s merit is paramount, not their bloodline.”

Dimitri’s voice had always had regal resonance, even back in his academy days. Its tempered edge had first come after Edelgard’s betrayal. The pain in his eye and his voice, however, was new, not from the blood in his shoulder, but the deeper wound in his heart.

“If you bear a grudge against me, then strike me down,” he challenged. “But I will command my soldiers to cease their battle, and I ask…”

Here he swallowed around something that threatened to choke him. Byleth still wondered if it could be blood.

“Hasn’t there been enough bloodshed?” Dimitri asked, his voice faltering. “I ask you to lay down your arms and end this war with me.”

Silence met the echoes of his plea. Out of the corner of his eye, Byleth caught movement in the tremble of Dimitri’s lower lip. He moved his hand from the hilt of his sword to Dimitri’s wrist, squeezing his clenched fist in the hopes of keeping the prince from falling to his knees and begging for peace as the silence dragged on.

The first to stand down was a gremory standing in the alcove, her hands glowing the particular hue that Byleth had learned to recognize from across a half-length of a battlefield as a meteor spell. When that light faded, Byleth let go of some of the tension in his body; she was the only soldier within range of imminent attack. Everyone else’s eyes were on the Imperial Knight several heavy paces away from the crown prince, whose plate armor tinkled like bells in an empty church when he shifted his arms, and whose sword whispered peace as it slid back into its sheath. These cues set off a chain reaction of surrender through the vestiges of the Imperial Army.

Dimitri exhaled so deeply that his body swayed. It seemed he was in imminent danger of falling to his knees regardless.

Still in the mind of battle, Byleth began to calculate a contingency plan, like Dimitri’s unstable stance was an element of warfare to strategize around. If Dedue were not encumbered by his armor, he could support the whole of Dimitri’s weight against him. Sharing the weight between Dedue and Byleth was not possible, not without lifting Dimitri’s wounded left shoulder in addition to his right. Borrowing a mount was the obvious solution, but the bulk of the cavalry had been charged with defense of the castle from the outside, to minimize the notorious difficulty that horses had in navigating stairs.

“Dimitri!” called a light, airy voice. She broke through the dissolving ranks with quick, sharp steps, one hand clutching the necklace from her brother as she ran. The other hand opened towards the prince and lit up with a Physic spell in the nick of time.

It took until that spell had run through his whole body, and perhaps a blink after that, for Dimitri to recognize the woman running up to inspect him. “Mercedes,” he uttered, as she rested a hand against his wounded chest. “What are you doing here? The professor told you to stay together with Annette and…”

Mercedes did not answer for her insubordination, but her eyes flicked to the side, where Dedue stood behind Dimitri in his bloody armor. She had come rushing in from the same direction as he, as if she had been tailing him just within the range of her spells throughout this final battle.

Dimitri left that protest unfinished, but he had another. “The professor has already tended to my wound with healing magic, Mercedes,” he said, though his voice sounded weak when he tried to make it gentle. “I will be fine. There’s no need to overexert yourself.”

“Please, Dimitri,” Mercedes said, brushing his hair behind his ear to study his face, “let me take care of you.”

There were exactly two Kingdom horses on which Byleth was banking to get Dimitri out of this castle without collapsing. His first choice was approaching from the left: a broad, dark, and sharp shadow whose rider was yanking off his helmet to expose a shock of red hair as they galloped forward. “Professor!” called Sylvain with his signature smile. “Highness! We all good?”

It took a second look for Byleth to figure why Sylvain was wearing a fake smile, despite the war having ended, and even in their favor. Then he noticed the extra lump in the horse’s silhouette, at the same time that Mercedes gave a soft gasp. Against the black coat and dark armor of Sylvain’s steed was a shimmer of midnight blue, then the pale face of Felix, unconscious.

“Nah, don’t worry about him,” Sylvain said before anyone could get a word out. “I gave him most of an elixir and I think he already had a concoction, he’s just sleeping it off now. Our little lone wolf here tried to run off ahead on his own, like always.”

Sleep was not an adequate descriptor of the state of consciousness that healing potions, and sometimes healing magic, could induce in excess. Although the wounds would close and the pain would fade, it was only a matter of time until the burst of energy would fade into dull nothingness. Despite his body hanging limp against the horse’s neck, Felix’s eyes were half-open, and he let out a short, meaningless mumble at every pause after Sylvain spoke, as if attempting to engage in their usual banter. Sylvain chuckled when he did, giving him a teasing thump on the shoulder with the horse’s reins. The laugh was the same as the smile.

That would have to wait. Sylvain was good at keeping his composure—and even the composure of others—in times of duress. Byleth moved Sylvain and Felix to the end of his mental queue of problems to solve. First in line was finding the second horse. The Dark Lady, as Sylvain called her, was sturdy and fierce to be sure, but asking her to carry more than two men along with her armored dress was too much after a long, hard battle.

“Has anyone seen Ashe?” Byleth asked.

Sylvain’s smile slipped as he took the apparent non sequitur of a question and put it into the context of the red splotch in Dimitri’s armor, the pallor of his face, and the way Mercedes fretted about him. “Yeah, he, uh, I saw him back helping out Ingrid?” he said, thumbing over his shoulder, then twisting around in his saddle to look and point in the right direction. “You could hear all over the castle what His Highness said. They should be here soon.”

Ingrid swooped in first, a flash of white wings, silver armor, and fierce focus. Her pegasus and Sylvain’s horse were such comfortable comrades that Gwenhwyfar landed directly alongside the Dark Lady and she did not so much as flinch. Sylvain made sure to smile at Ingrid so that she knew Felix was alright. Still, she had to lay a hand on his back for herself, and let go of a heavy sigh. Felix responded with a short groan. She managed a smile.

Setting aside how difficult it would be for Dimitri to handle a flying mount for the first time with only one reliable arm, most pegasuses balked at the approach of a male rider. Ingrid’s own Gwenhwyfar was no exception. Even when Sylvain tried for the umpteenth time just to give her a friendly scratch on the neck, she whipped his head away with a disgruntled snort. At the sudden sound and movement, Ingrid gave Sylvain a suspicious glare. He held up his open palms in innocence.

“Seteth and Flayn are searching the palace for Lady Rhea,” she reported to the prince and the professor. “I think Gilbert was going to go with them, so Annette…”

“Has gone as well,” Dimitri said with a nod.

“Ashe is making his way up the stairs,” Ingrid said while counting the rest of the heads in the castle. “That’s everyone, then, isn’t it?”

Watching the smile bloom on Dimitri’s face, knowing that all of his dear ones had made it through the war with him, was like seeing the sunrise crest over the landscape at the bridge outside the Garreg Mach cathedral. Just as soon as he had come to a full glow, he listed deeply to his right.

The startled shouts of “Your Highness!” cut off with the clang and scrape of Dimitri’s armor against Dedue’s. Dedue held so fast and tight to his liege that he barely sagged, despite the sheer effort it took for him to lift just his good arm to cling to Dedue for stability.

It was towards that sight that the last set of hoofbeats, muffled against the carpet, rushed towards the Blue Lions. Ashe and Cinder were a pair as inevitable as their names and the shared spite of their dreams. During stable duty in his academy days, Ashe had helped to rear the unusually small colt, dreaming of one day riding this pale grey dark horse as a knight. Both he and Cinder were still smaller than what would be expected even of a bow knight, but Cinder was agile, Ashe was clever, and both were determined to do better than anyone expected of them. Ashe was still a full ten lengths away when he slid over his saddle, steering his horse from its side while hanging perched from a single stirrup. He leapt from his horse and carried the momentum in his steps to his classmates’ sides, still holding his bow in his other hand with an arrow tucked between his fingers.

Cinder could shoot like an arrow, turn like a whip, and stop on a dime, but, as Byleth murmured when they helped Dimitri climb into the saddle, “He won’t hold the weight of two.”

His voice did not come out as quiet as he had hoped. While Dedue nodded and raised his arm to support Dimitri’s balance from the ground, Ashe snapped his gaze to the ground as if guilty. For a moment, Sylvain cast a pitying look down from atop the massive Dark Lady at the prince fumbling with the reins of the considerably shorter horse. His attention inevitably shifted back to holding Felix steady against him as they prepared to move.

“Ingrid,” Byleth said, “scout ahead. We need a secure path out of the castle and through the city to the Mittelfrank Opera House.”

She took her orders with the stoic determination of the knight that she had become, up until Byleth stated the target destination. Then her eyes widened and her mouth opened slightly. Less than a second later, she bottled her words with a nod and kicked off with a flurry of feathers, calling for her battalion to follow.

Dimitri nudged Dedue’s guiding hand away from his waist. “Dedue, please, I’ll be fine,” he insisted, though his voice was growing raspy. “The professor taught me how to ride horses back in—in our academy days, remember? It’s—been some time, but…”

“Mercedes,” Byleth continued, touching her shoulder to draw her attention away from worrying over Dimitri. “The battle in the streets of Enbarr left civilians wounded. Stay with a battalion, stay behind Ingrid, and stay safe above all else, but—”

Mercedes was already nodding, her lips tight and eyes shining. “Thank you, professor,” she said in parting.

“The war might be over, but your strategy never ends, does it, professor?” Sylvain said with a smirk that only looked genuine because it was an appropriate time for a bittersweet smile.

Ashe took the rein that Dimitri’s left hand could not grip and helped guide the horse forward as they started the first leg of a slow return home. Cinder snorted with distrust when they came to the top of the first staircase, shuffling his hooves in place even as Ashe tugged on his bridle. “Come on,” he whispered, his freckled cheeks starting to flush, “we just took these stairs a minute ago. I know it’s harder going down than up, but…”

Dimitri bent lower over his hands, his stare almost as vacant as it had been when Byleth first found him waiting in the Goddess Tower. It could have been for any reason—blood loss, the horror of Edelgard’s demise, the sheer absurdity of leading an army to slay an emperor and subsequently being unable to lead a tame horse. While they were at a standstill, Byleth shifted to mirror Dedue on Dimitri’s left side, just in case.

“We got it, we’ll head down first,” Sylvain said, veering the Dark Lady around Cinder with a practiced pull of the reins. “They do better following sometimes. C’mon, Lady.”

He kicked her into an easy trot down the stairs. After another reluctant snort, Cinder followed, slowly at first, and then at the same pace. Ahead, what had once been nonsense muttering turned more distinct, first with the emerging refrain, “Cut it out. Cut it _out_ ,” until Felix had enough presence of mind to find himself in Sylvain’s arms and yell, “Let _go_ of me.”

“Buddy, if you wanna fall off a horse and down the stairs, by all means,” Sylvain teased. “Hey, easy. Easy. You got yourself hurt pretty bad, you know that?”

Byleth abandoned his position by Dimitri to shadow the other horse. Felix swung his arms against Sylvain’s caging him in, jostling the reins and startling the Dark Lady. As they emerged from the stairwell and came into the light from the castle’s front hall windows, the streaks of drying blood on Felix’s enraged face began to show. “I don’t need your coddling,” he seethed.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” As soon as they were back on even footing, Sylvain slipped his reins to one hand and lifted the other. “Just gonna say, this is all rich coming from the guy who once kicked down my door because he heard I got hurt.”

He winked at the professor as he let Felix go. Byleth lifted a hand to signal the horse behind him to halt when Felix shoved himself off of the front of the saddle. More worrisome than the blood on his face was the sorry state of his armor: singed, slashed, and stained with just as much of his blood as his enemies’. Within three weak-kneed steps, his legs gave out and he fell forward onto his hands, where his elbows, too, buckled, and he collapsed in a puddle of jelly limbs. Ashe gasped, Byleth came to his side, and Sylvain laughed, tight and curt.

“Damn, you sure showed me.” His sarcasm bled with too much anger, a dangerous thinning of his carefree façade. At his lead, the Dark Lady turned and stopped in front of Felix struggling to his feet, and Sylvain held out his hand, palm up. “You’ve got a few options, Felix, and sorry, but you’re not gonna like any of them. Either you suck it up and ride with me, you let the professor help you walk, or you keep slowing down the whole group with your pride.”

Felix swatted Byleth’s helping hand out of the way as he wobbled upright, evidently rejecting option two. He swayed before his first step, and he lost his balance after his second, but he reached out his hand as he fell forward into the Dark Lady. Swerving his arm past Sylvain’s attempt to catch it, he latched instead onto the skirt of teal fabric hanging from the rider’s waist. The bump to Dark Lady’s side, near her hindquarters, jostled her into movement. His grip was tight to the point of shaking, but Felix kept his stumbling feet carrying him forward at the same pace Lady’s hesitant walk.

Sylvain’s smile softened. “Alright, alright, you win,” he sighed. “But knock it off, you’re gonna pull down my pants. Here, hold onto...”

He pried Felix’s hand from his clothes and guided it to a grip on the saddle’s fastenings. If the way he supported Felix’s weight with his hand as he carried it was more gentle than gentlemanly, or if he lingered a little too long closing Felix’s hand around the buckled strap, Byleth did not say anything, just as he had not said anything when Sylvain’s chin dipped perhaps a bit too far below the threshold of Felix’s raven hair while the unconscious boy lay against his chest. Byleth had spent most of his life not saying much at all. In learning to speak, he never forgot when to stay silent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full disclosure that I will inevitably and unfortunately linger over the m/m ships more than the f/f ones since the main characters are male, but I intend to do them more justice than (checks chapter notes) flagrantly failing the bechdel test by immediately dismissing all female characters from the scene


	2. A Few Seconds, Twice Over

Five or six years ago, when Byleth’s hardened eyes saw death, it would take a conscious retreat into his mind to listen for her voice, to ask for her first to stop time, then to reverse it. It became easier with time, as he began to feel her presence beside him always—when she was bored, when she was excited, and even just the presence of her warmth when she slept—as the two of them became more like one unit.

Then they became one unit forever and he never heard her voice again, and turning back the hands of time was easier than blinking, and even less voluntary.

The first shout was not from Dedue, but from a soldier in one of the battalions surrounding the generals’ slow march through the bloodied streets of Enbarr. Byleth whipped around in her direction, hand snapped to the Creator Sword, and the flurry of Dimitri’s cape caught his attention. Dedue was too busy grabbing at it in vain to cry out as Dimitri slid off of the saddle, to the opposite side of his retainer, and plummeted. His head bounced once against the pavement and Byleth saw blood scraped all across his face.

Easier than blinking. Even less voluntary.

Byleth was facing forward again, four steps back. He stopped mid-stride to turn around. Ashe, leading Cinder down the cobblestone path, turned his head to say something to Dedue. Dimitri blinked slowly, his head sinking. When he began to slip from the saddle again, it occurred to Byleth that the Divine Pulse had not triggered when Felix collapsed.

With how often they battled beside one another, Byleth had felt Dimitri’s weight against him many times, and he could not rightly recall the first. There was a moment early on in the school year, and it may not even have been Dimitri whom he was thinking of, where he remembered bearing that great weight of another person against him and wondering once again why he had been chosen to teach the students of Garreg Mach when he was scarcely any older than them—in Mercedes’s case, even younger, as far as he knew. He felt like one lost young adult among many, just as small and unsure as those he was expected to guide when they came to him with questions and problems that could not be solved with weapons or magic.

In the ways of combat, he taught them that which he knew and they did not, and he walked with them to find the answers that lay beyond the battlefield, and at some point he went from thinking, “They’re my age,” to thinking, “They’re my students.” They fascinated him, they taught him things he did not know, and he protected them, because Rhea had made them his responsibility. It felt natural, like mercenary work, but somehow more personal, since the pay for his protection was more than just a monthly stipend.

Things changed again when he woke up to find that, after a year of spinning back time, suddenly five years had passed him by. He looked and felt no older, but his students had changed, had grown into young men and women, had learned the way of battle on their own, had become in every way his peers. They were teaching seminars on the weekends now, every bit as capable as he. Yet still they called him the professor, still they followed his strategy like it was the word of the Goddess herself, still they came to him for guidance as if he knew any better than they how to save this world or anyone in it. Somewhere in those five empty years, Dimitri’s body against his back had become again so heavy to bear, the weight of a grown man with more troubles than Byleth knew how to carry.

As Byleth caught that weight in his arms, held this body much too large to cradle, he wondered whether he might say now, instead of his students, they had become his friends. It felt wrong to think it, somehow, not least because he had never called someone his friend before. He had seen friendship through them: the longstanding bonds among Dimitri, Ingrid, Sylvain, and Felix; the joyful camaraderie shared by Mercedes and Annette; the natural kinship that had bloomed between Ashe and Dedue. It was not only that they had history together that Byleth had missed. More than that, they had humanity, where Byleth, standing in the city streets like a living pietà with the King hanging in his arms, had at best nothing—at worst, divinity.

Amidst the gasps from onlookers, as Ashe gave a surprised cry, while Sylvain halted his horse with a louder command than was necessary, when Dedue appeared at His Highness’s side to help support his battered body, Dimitri’s eye fluttered half-open and he gave a slurred mumble of, “Professor?”

How Byleth felt about this former student in particular could absolutely not be called friendship, but that was a stone he would leave unturned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full disclosure that this chapter was a challenge in how many words I could write for as short a timespan as possible using the power of gay pining.


	3. The Opera House Siege

It did not take long for word of Dimitri’s fall to spread, reaching Mercedes, Ingrid, and even Gilbert and Annette back in the castle. All four reunited with the slowly marching party before they had made their way to the opera house. Ingrid and Mercedes returned first, with the news that the few remaining blocks ahead of them were as eerie-still and barren of all but blood-spatter as those they had already traversed. “There’s still artillery out in front of the opera house, but no one’s there,” Ingrid reported, a worried crease between her brows. “We’re not sure if anyone’s in there.”

“We must be cautious,” said Dedue, firmly holding onto Dimitri, who now lay fully flat against Cinder’s back rather than maintain the semblance of consciousness at the risk of another fall. “It would be best to take a defensive approach.”

Byleth nodded in agreement. He could not say what exactly he saw in Mercedes’s face that told him she had used every last drop of her healing magic to keep any more blood from dripping into the spaces between the cobblestones paving the streets. Whatever it was, he saw it drained from all of the sacred mages of their forces, clinging close to the defended center of their marching formation. Not only were their soldiers weakened, but they could not recover from a second attack.

Dedue and Ingrid held the front line, joined by Gilbert upon his return from a yet-fruitless castle search. Just behind those three were Mercedes, Annette, and Byleth, his Creator Sword unsheathed. He would have objected to Mercedes’s place among them were it not for Annette reaching for her hand and squeezing it.

“Don’t run away like that again,” Annette whispered, a little bit chiding, but overwhelmingly shaken. “I was really scared for you.”

“I’m sorry, Annie,” Mercedes whispered back, nodding. “Now that this war is over, I can promise I’ll never run away from you again.”

“Stop joking! You really scared me, I mean it!”

“I know, I know. I really do mean it, too, Annie, I’m sorry,” Mercedes insisted, gripping Annette’s hand with both of hers. “I don’t want to fight anymore. I’ll stay by your side.”

Byleth had to give Annette a nudge on the back to remind her to keep walking. She stared at Mercedes’s hands, at Mercedes, then tore her hand away. “Stop joking,” she said in a small, small voice.

When the army came to the Mittelfrank grounds, their battalions bearing the battleworn but victorious banners of the Blue Lions, a shadow slipped out of a side door near the entrance. It darted down the stairs with careful steps—high-heeled shoes—towards the black magic ballista.

“Protect His Highness!” Gilbert barked back at the battalions, who swarmed around the injured party in quick response, as the front lines readied a row of lances. Without a second thought, Byleth broke through their ranks, his sword still glowing when he tucked it back at his side, and raced straight for the woman turning the catapult their way, a fire lit in its belly.

Alarmed by what looked like impulsiveness coming from the man who always strategized—and perhaps it was impulse—his students called out after him. He was guided by the same thing that had compelled him to tell Ingrid to seek a path to the opera house. It was an unfounded hope, one that made him come to a stop in the path of fire, breathless from sprinting, and raise his right hand to the sky. If she could not see the glowing sword at his side, if she did not hear the familiar voices calling him “professor”, she would at least see him projecting the Crest of Flames. Then she could make the choice of whether or not to shoot.

He had never been _her_ professor, perhaps, but once, long ago, she had fought alongside his Blue Lions, and that was all it took for her to win him over. There had been plenty of students at Garreg Mach who hated taking to the battlefield—Hilda, Marianne, Linhardt, his own Sylvain—but her hatred of it was different. When the cause was just, she would fight without hesitation and with pride in her own power, even as it wilted her soul. She sacrificed the whole of her vibrant bloom during the five years of relentless war, until, by the time they reached this bloody reunion, there was nothing left of her but thorns.

The footsteps all stopped behind Byleth. The weapon did not fire, but the glow and crackle of flames on the ammunition did not fade, nor did the operator move from behind the artillery.

Byleth took a step forward. Still there was no movement from the catapult. He took another step, and another, and then he was walking. When he came too close to be in range of trajectory for the projectiles, he could see Dorothea’s stony face behind strands of stray hair. It was not like her to let her hair get messy, even in battle, and especially not when she had not even entered combat.

“You didn’t attack,” she said, hands still gripping the controls to the machine as Byleth climbed up the platform. “You fought our whole army, you seized all the other artillery—I kept firing at you, but you wouldn’t…”

It was not a smart move by any account. Catherine had gotten badly singed by Dorothea’s fire on the ascent to the castle, and Seteth had a close call that almost forced his retreat, keeping both of the seasoned warriors from the front lines for the final battle. Still, Byleth gave no one the orders to target her.

“It’s… over now, isn’t it?” she uttered. The heat of the fire in the catapult flickered out in the soft winds when she lifted her shaking hands at last. “Not just the war, but—Edie, she’s really…”

All the students at Garreg Mach, not just the ones Byleth could call his own, had taken to him in a way they did not to the other professors and faculty. Perhaps it was _because_ of his young age that they saw in him not just a teacher, but a potential ally, dare he say, a _friend_. When Dorothea’s eyes welled up with tears, he tried to be that friend he had never felt like, and wrapped his arms around her.

“Don’t,” she whispered, even as she gripped him back like a lifeline. “You’re—you’re making it feel _real_. Please don’t.”

Neither of them let go. She began to shake with quiet sobs.

“I didn’t want to fight,” she managed to say. “I didn’t want this war. I just—” She drew in a shuddering gasp. “I believed in her. I wanted to see the world she saw. I wanted to… I loved her so much I was willing to die for her, professor. I don’t know what’s left.”

A chilling silence came over her. Though she was heavier in his arms when her rigid shoulders went slack from the weight of grief, she felt hollow inside.

“Is everyone in the opera company safe?” Byleth asked in a low voice.

Dorothea could not respond through the lump in her throat. She pulled a short distance back and nodded. Her eyes were red and wet, smudged with grey underneath where her makeup had begun to run. “But everything’s changed, professor,” she said, her voice barely there. “It’s only been five years, but…” She lowered her head, fingers toying around the curls at the ends of her hair. “Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed.”

It took her startling for Byleth to realize he had raised a hand to her cheek. After a chagrined moment’s hesitation, he brushed the windswept hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She gathered herself with a long sigh and a teary smile.

The breeze turned to gusts from heavy wingbeats. Pegasus hooves were daintier than horses’, even when they touched down from the sky to stone with four gentle taps in quick succession. As soon as Ingrid dismounted, Dorothea lunged for her with a plaintive, “Ingrid—oh, _Ingrid_.”

Ingrid was rigid at first, still gripping her spear. Dorothea squeezed a sound out of her chest that Byleth had not heard before. Although he remembered the two getting along with one another back in their academy days, their acquaintanceship had been the circumstantial sort, of two girls brought together only by consequence and separated easily by the same. What Ingrid considered a lost connection was suddenly to Dorothea of utmost importance. After watching her comrades fall one by one, old acquaintances were the only familiarity she had left.

Ingrid looked to Byleth for an explanation. His sorrow must have been showing on his face, because he saw it reflected in her in an instant. She let her spear clatter to the ground and wrapped both arms around Dorothea, closing her eyes. “It’s good to see you again,” she said softly. “We… have a lot of catching up to do, huh?”

Dorothea managed a weak laugh, rubbing at an eye with the back of her hand. “We sure do.”

A wolf-whistle cut through their tearful reunion, accompanied by the clop of heavy hooves. All of the Kingdom’s forces were approaching the opera house’s stairs now, led by one dark knight with his helmet under one arm and a winning smile flashing across his face. “My Goddess, if it isn’t the lovely Dorothea!” Sylvain called as he approached. “What a sight for sore eyes. May I just say, you look as _ravishing_ as ever?”

Ingrid’s face flamed with rage, but Dorothea was all cool poise. “Sylvain,” she said, dabbing nonchalantly under her eyes with one fingertip. “I see you haven’t changed at all. And, no, you may not say that. Thank you for asking.”

He clapped a hand over the blow she had dealt to his heart. “You wound me, fair lady,” he sighed. “Look, I’ll get to the point, I’ve got a favor I wanted to—”

“Don’t bother,” she said, then glanced at Byleth. “I mean—you don’t need to ask. I know you need a place to rest after the battle. It’s yours, if you’re willing to share. I just—was worried you’d take it by force.”

Byleth forced a smile onto his face. It was the first smile he could remember forcing not because it was a social convention expected of him, but because it was so terribly difficult.

“Thank you, Dorothea,” Ingrid said, dipping into a deep bow with her hand to her chest. By the time she raised her head, the nature of the gesture she had just performed caught up to her; her face came up wide-eyed and pink-cheeked. Dorothea, too, stood stunned, and began to flush deeper with her nervous laughter.

“Wow, a noble bowing like this to a commoner?” she teased. “We may have lost the war, but… maybe I’ll still get to see the world Edie was dreaming of.”


	4. Last Leg

The grand entrance atop the white stone staircase of the Mittelfrank Opera House was actually the poorer man’s entrance to the hall, Dorothea said, as she led the cavalry down an adjacent alleyway. Far from the front-facing ornamented windows now shielded with the wooden backs of old set pieces from out-of-fashion operas, under a wide, dark arch at the edge of the building, was a parking stable meant for the carriages of the highest nobility. Here the valet would drop its distinguished guests off at a private entrance that led directly to the front of the orchestra level, or—for the unfathomably wealthy—to the network of dim corridors that spiraled up to the box seats along the sides of the hall. The infantry climbing the stairs to the front entrance would enter the theatre at the back of the first tier; those with the most spring in their step could proceed on upwards to the second. With the army spread out as such, all would have a cushioned seat in which to rest their war-weary bodies.

Before a single Kingdom soldier could enter from any direction, however, the refugees in the opera house needed to dismantle the barricades blocking the doors. Dorothea drew a breath that filled her lungs from the bottom to the top and sang the faithful refrain that wound its way into every church hymn, the theme that ornamental marching trumpets were built to sing out, the amen cadence of Fódlan. “It’s a signal,” she explained as the sounds of movement stirred from within the hall. “I was going to sing an aria if we were victorious, but… this is the song for the powers of the Church of Seiros winning over the Empire.”

“We don’t represent the Church,” Byleth said, but Dorothea had shot fire directly at Catherine and Seteth and was not interested in the technicalities. Faerghus was, after all, a Holy Kingdom.

The song did represent more nuance than simply defeat. The Church had been so powerful for so long not by pure tyranny and fascism, for that rarely wins as many earnest allies as it had. To the Adrestians, the Church of Seiros and the worship of the Goddess and saints were two separate entities, one reviled and one revered. This hymn represented not the Church, but the love of and for the Goddess. To those hiding in the opera house, this song meant that the Kingdom had come with the true intentions of the Goddess: benevolence for the people.

“Think I’m afraid to ask,” Sylvain said, riding alongside Dorothea even as she made efforts to stay well in front of him and his horse, “but what was the song you were gonna sing if we… _didn’t_ come in peace?”

“I wouldn’t be singing,” Dorothea said coldly. “There would be orb fire, and then I’d be dead. A symphony for army and heavy artillery.”

Although most of the Blue Lions were on foot, for one reason or another they all ended up following the cavalry to the stables. Prince Dimitri, of course, was still indisposed upon horseback, led by Ashe and guarded by Dedue. When Sylvain had ridden ahead to work diplomacy with Dorothea, he left Felix standing shaky but upright by himself, of course at his own insistence. Almost without words, Ashe offered the stirrups on Cinder’s saddle to Felix as support in the Dark Lady’s absence. Felix, as expected, did not oblige. He walked beside the horse but kept his arms folded to his chest, tightly enough that Byleth gave him surreptitious glances to see if he still had injuries that his rounds of healing drinks could not fully mend. By the grace of the Goddess, he did not balk when Annette walked closely beside him, offering no outward assistance, but most certainly nudging him upright when one of his steps faltered. Mercedes had just promised not to leave her side, so with Annette she stayed. In addition, there was mention of preparing dinner as a show of goodwill from the Kingdom army to the Mittelfrank residents. Mercedes, Ashe, and also Gilbert offered their hands in the cooking efforts, and the shortest way to the house’s kitchen was to enter at the rear. That was all of the Kingdom generals somehow finding their way to the first class entrance to the theatre.

Certainly Dorothea had been among the older students at Garreg Mach when she enrolled, but she had already risen to divadom in her teens. It should not have surprised Byleth, then, to see such youth in the faces through the glass as volunteers cleared boards, sandbags, chairs, props, and set pieces away from the doors. The first one to rush out and throw her arms around Dorothea’s middle could have been no older than fourteen, a full head-and-a-half shorter than her senior.

“It’s alright,” Dorothea murmured, stroking her hair. “We’ll be alright, sweetheart.”

The rest of the young company unbarring the doors came out more hesitantly than the first of their number, their wary eyes darting from soldier to horse to soldier occupying their stables. Byleth wondered if he could will the Creator Sword to stop glowing at his side. When he inclined his head in a small, deferent bow to signal peace, the only responses he got were a couple of empty stares. These civilians had no reason to know he was the major general of the Kingdom army; to them, he just looked like an odd fellow with odd hair and an odd sword.

Dorothea coming into the center of their uncertain cluster lit them like fire by which she could warm herself, speaking in hushed tones about the battle she had seen, the outcome of the one she had not, and the night ahead. Byleth saw in her eyes the masked trepidation of being the one to whom people look for guidance, and not knowing if one really deserves that position on the pedestal. He wondered if she had always been able to see that in him. All her coy smiles and casual conversations from years ago had never seemed much like the flirting that others had called it. Perhaps it was intended as commiseration.

Sylvain exhaled long and heavy when he came to a stop at one of the closest hitching posts to the doors of the rear entrance. Gripping his saddlehorn, he leaned all his weight forward over his hands to straighten his legs and lift himself out of his saddle. After a pause, he swung his right leg over. He paused again with both feet toeing into his left stirrup, then he dropped himself to the ground, landing on his right foot with a bounce, arms out to keep his balance. Satisfied with his landing, he gripped onto the Dark Lady’s armor and took a horrible limp of a step forward to secure her reins to the post.

“Sylvain,” Byleth said in a low voice from directly behind him.

If he had not had a gash in his left thigh so red with blood that it made his bare skin blend in with his pants, he might have jumped three feet in the air. Instead, he only managed about six inches. “Professor,” he squeaked, his smile twitching erratically. “You, uh… Uh.”

Byleth sighed and extended his arm to Sylvain at shoulder height. He did not like how Sylvain hesitated before leaning onto the support, as if waiting for a punchline to a cruel joke. Putting too little weight onto Byleth’s shoulders, Sylvain limped slow and pronounced, garnering the attention of every general and soldier in the immediate vicinity.

After hastily finishing the tie for her pegasus, Ingrid showed her concern in her usual way. “What happened?” she demanded, marching towards him with her hands balled into fists.

“Relax, Ingrid, I’m fine,” Sylvain drawled. “Just picking up a sexy scar as a battle souvenir. Something to show all the ladies when they wanna see the Great Sylvain of House Gautier, who fought for the Kingdom in the legendary Battle of Enbarr…”

Ingrid looked down at the wound again—particularly at its proximity to his groin—and flared her nostrils. Sylvain almost lost his balance trying to cross his good leg in front of his bad one, a reflex he had learned from all the other times he had seen her furious eyes drop below his belt.

Where Ingrid was vinegar, Mercedes was honey. Though exhausted of all her healing spells after two battles and a bonus round back through the city, she had gentleness in her touch as she examined the wound. “How long has it been bleeding like this?” she worried, peeling the torn edges of fabric, soaked through with drying blood, free from his skin. “Did you take any medicine for it?”

“I had an elixir dose when I first got hit, but it just started opening up again,” he said. “One of those suckers that won’t stay closed, y’know?”

Byleth was not in the habit of getting stabbed. His personal strategy against enemy strikes was typically to dodge, not to brace for the hit. He did not know, at least not from experience, why students ended up in the infirmary for days with injuries when strong enough healing magic and potions seemed to cure every wound instantly on the battlefield. It was horrifically late, but he was starting to understand.

In the distance, Ashe and Dedue helped Dimitri balance upright and wrestled his legs to the same side of the saddle to dismount. Byleth only caught a glimpse before Dedue hoisted the semi-conscious prince onto his back, but there was definitely more blood smeared across Dimitri’s chestplate than before. His first selfish thought was that he should not have let Mercedes use her healing magic on civilians before tending to his own army.

In the commotion, Dorothea stepped away from her small crowd. She looked at Sylvain with a mixture of exasperation and dumbstruck amazement similar to that experienced when finding a leashed dog irreparably tangled around its post and restrained to a short length of rope by a seemingly impossible blend of cleverness and shortsightedness, all the while panting in the shape of a smile.

“There are twenty-four boxes in the hall,” she said eventually, looking at Byleth. “It could give the wounded a bit of privacy, but you’ll have to take some stairs to get there.”

“Oh,” Sylvain said airily, his free hand over his heart and his eyes running up and down Dorothea’s dress, “won’t some _beautiful_ lady help this war-weary hero up the stairs and nurse him back to health with her healing magic?”

“Sylvain, I hate to break it to you—actually, I don’t hate it at all. I won’t lie,” Dorothea said. “I’m good at black magic, sure, but I’ve always been terrible at faith. I can’t heal you.”

“R—really?” Sylvain stuttered in his speech as well as his steps, but he continued less than a second later. “Mercedes, you know, you’re looking—”

“She’s out of spells, Sylvain,” Byleth said flatly.

It did not stop her from trying. Watching the light of white magic flicker dimly in her palm was too much like watching the twitching signs of life fade from a soldier’s dying body. Though she slowed the ooze of blood from the wound, Byleth slid his hand into her palm to push it away when he could no longer bear to watch her strain herself. That she did not protest to being stopped spoke volumes.

“Professor, do you still have any healing magic left?” Annette asked. Before waiting for a response, she glanced over her shoulder to be sure Felix did not stray far from her, but he, too, was staring at Sylvain’s injury. “I’m all out, too, but—”

At the shake of Byleth’s head, Sylvain stroked his chin and murmured to himself, “Well, maybe Flayn will come back from the castle soon and—oooh, maybe she’ll come back with the archbishop? Imagine getting healed by Lady Rhea _herself_ —”

“—but Felix knows some healing magic, too, doesn’t he?” Annette finished.

She caught Sylvain with his jaw slightly open and he failed to close it. Felix blinked at the mention of his name, slowly processing through words, before deepening the already dark crease between his brows.

“We may still have curatives in the convoy,” Byleth suggested instead. Healing magic never demanded more from him than his concentration, but it had also permanently fixed any of his cuts and scrapes, so he was trying not to use himself as a reference for anything at present. Felix looked one stiff breeze away from falling over, and pale enough for Byleth to wonder about how many wounds were reopening under his armor slashed near to shreds.

Sylvain had made onlookers of even the opera company members with his posturing. “Aw, _please_ ,” he joked, hand out to them, “won’t one of you cute things help poor, injured Sylvain and tend to his _mortal wounds_ …”

Byleth narrowed his eyes as he raked them across Sylvain’s whole person. “Wounds?” he repeated. “Multiple?”

Sylvain should have been, had always been used to dialogue straying from his silly scripts, yet he flustered again. “No, it’s not actually—I was just,” he stammered, then turned back to his youthful audience. “I’m saying, doesn’t one of you pretty chorus girls know a spell or two, maybe from your days singing in church—”

“We’re stagehands, not singers,” said the girl clinging closest to Dorothea’s side. “Don’t know any magic and we can’t sing for shit.”

“ _I_ can sing,” protested another girl, setting off a chorus of eyerolls—evidently the only kind of chorus of which the crew was capable.

“I played the drums for that one show with all the military shit,” another boy chimed in. “Does that count?”

“Alright, okay, stagehands I can work with,” Sylvain declared. “You must be _real_ strong ladies to, uh—move all that stuff around? So—”

Every day, Byleth found a new reason to thank the Goddess for Ingrid. (Prayers were a nice way to remember her, he thought, like sitting at his father’s tombstone at Garreg Mach when he missed him. Standing in the church and speaking to Sothis, hoping she would hear, was not much different.) Usually his blessings were upon her otherworldly agility, or the quick precision of her lance. Today it was for the way she marched up to Sylvain, bent him in half over her shoulders, and lifted him squealing off the ground.

“Dorothea,” she said, her voice barely strained, “show me where to take him.”

Starting right then, and for the rest of the night, Dorothea had a sparkle in her eyes whenever she looked at Ingrid. Sylvain, for his part, was red from his hairline down to his neck, a color that could have been blamed on hanging half-upside down from Ingrid’s shoulders until it persisted long after he had been carried up the stairs and set down in a chair in Box 2. She all but dropped him there, dusting off her hands as she turned away with a huff, while he stared slack-jawed at the back that had borne him so effortlessly.

“I’ll have soldiers in your battalion look after you,” she said, clearly implying _keep you from bothering anybody else_. “Male soldiers.”

“Y’know, wouldn’t be my first choice, but hey,” he quipped, “if he’s cute, I’ll try anything once.”

Felix, still shadowed by Annette, had just trudged into the back of the box and exchanged a look with Ingrid as he gripped the back of his own chair to fall into. The boxes were roomy spaces, each with chairs and footstools to seat four, certainly enough room to board two men for a night, especially two as close as Sylvain and Felix. At Sylvain’s latest line, he paused there with his fingers sinking into the plush of the chair, staring at empty space as he absorbed the words, calculated, and then turned around and started to trudge back out.

Byleth and Annette each caught him by an arm. “Both of you, look out for each other,” Annette scolded, because if there were anything that could get Felix to comply, it was Annette’s scolding. Despite putting on his worst and most threatening of scowls, he turned back and shoved his chair up beside Sylvain’s.

“Not… exactly what I had in mind for my cute healer,” Sylvain ground out.

Annette had left the box already, steps clicking down the stairs to attend to further business, but Ingrid stayed a moment longer for the same reason Byleth did: to level Sylvain with a silent stare as he looked anywhere but at Felix. The blood in his face showed no sign of leaving when he caught them looking.

They exited together, drawing the box curtain shut behind them. The next curtain over, Box 4, was now closed, with Gilbert standing sentinel outside. No doubt Dimitri was inside, likely with Dedue tending to him. They gave one other acknowledging nods in that narrow, sloping hall before Ingrid started back down and Byleth kept close behind.

He dipped his head low to reach her ear. She slowed to hear him mutter, “Why the resistance, I wonder?”

She laughed once, resuming her brisk pace. “It’s one thing to flirt with someone you don’t know,” she said. “It’s another thing when it’s your best friend, and it _means_ something.” Where the stairwell turned, she smiled up at him something rueful. “So he’s told me.”

Byleth nodded. “He certainly looked at a loss for what to say to you.”

Just like that, the smile vanished. “I don’t want him to look at me like that,” she said, something bitter like venom on her tongue.

“I don’t think he could ever stop looking at women,” Byleth said.

“I know. I don’t want him…” Ingrid shook her head as if to drop the topic.

Byleth shrugged. “I guess it really is a genuine weakness of his. I thought it was overcompensation, but he would know that’s futile at this point,” he said. “We all know. Even Felix must know by now.”

“You’d be surprised how much Felix misses when he’s focused on something else,” Ingrid said, pushing out of the stairwell not to the foyer, but to the orchestra seats. “But maybe if there’s not a war to focus on anymore… Well, we’ll see.”

Byleth had caught only a glimpse of the splendor of the hall from the balcony window of the box seat. The velvet lining those walls also carpeted the floors from the front of the hall to the back, and up into the floating layers of seats that made the first and second tiers. The ceiling stretched impossibly high above them without pillars for support, just sloping stained glass and iron converging into a resonant dome. From within the hall, standing just beside the stage and facing the first row of the orchestra seats, the boxes were just rows of rounded bay windows in the elaborate relief along the walls, wood carved in shapes of saints and cherubim and instruments as old as the hall itself. A grand chandelier, lined with what looked like a hundred candles, was rising up on a chain in the center of the seats, freshly lit and casting a warm glow that pointed at Dorothea as she walked to center stage.

Her voice rang out with the acoustics of the theatre and the click of her heels echoed along with it. “Dedue, Sylvain, you can draw shut the curtain at the front of the box, too,” she sang out. “The cables are at the far side of the—yes, that’s it, Dedue. Felix, darling, pull the _other_ way.”

Sylvain’s laugh was soft at its source, but it was remarkable how the shape of the hall carried Dorothea’s light voice sailing upwards yet deadened Sylvain’s inside the box. Felix was hard to hear even when he shouted over the balcony, “Why are there even curtains here? Isn’t the point of going to the opera to _see_ the show?”

“Oh, Felix, sweetie,” Dorothea sighed, “when bringing a _date_ to the box seats? Never.”

After a pregnant pause, Felix hastily tugged at the cord to close the lace-stitched curtains, glaring daggers down at Dorothea as she let out peals of laughter. Inspired by the resonance of the high registers of her voice, she sang out, for the first of many times that night, a short refrain: a warm note with a trilling mordant at its end just before she leapt gloriously high, then cascaded back down with all the lightness of a petal fluttering to the ground. By all measures, it was a joyous strain of a melody, and she sang it as such, that one might think she had recovered her good spirits if one did not see the heartwrenching melancholy in her eyes.

Haunted as he was by the sight, well after Dorothea lowered her head, turned, and exited to backstage right, Byleth did not hear Ingrid speaking to him until she had repeated, “Professor?” more than once.

“I spoke with my battalion,” she said. “We should set up a guard outside to protect the opera house from attack if anyone finds out they’re quartering Kingdom soldiers. We’re all ready to take the first shift.”

That was another Goddess-thanked thing about Ingrid, how she could fight on and on and on. She and her flying battalion had led the charge in the Enbarr battle, foiled pincer attacks inside the castle, and single-handedly spearheaded the path back. After that grand effort, she carried a man twice her weight in armor up a lengthy flight of stairs on her shoulders, and here she was asking— _pleading_ —to do more.

His heavy hands met resistance when he put them on her shoulders. He added more weight until they finally sank to a more relaxed height.

“I’m alright, professor,” she insisted, before he had to say a word. “I got lucky today, I wasn’t hurt like anyone else. I’d like to use that good fortune to help everyone.”

The strategy of blank silence was not always as successful with Ingrid, when she was not just avoiding the truth, but actively fighting it. Byleth closed his eyes to break off his stare before it turned from emotionless into something more defeated. He inhaled, considering his words.

“If you push yourself any further today—you _or_ your battalion,” he added, when he saw the fire rising in her eyes, “there’s too great a chance you won’t see tomorrow. I won’t risk that.”

Her shoulders jumped up again. “Professor, I assure you I can—”

“Ingrid,” he said, pushing back down. “I’d like you to go back out to the parking stable and make sure all of the mounts are secured and cared for. If Ashe is still out there, send him inside to help with dinner. I can arrange for another team to take the first guard.”

It was work he had assigned to her, something necessary, something to do with her restless limbs even if she thought they were best suited to fighting. With resignation, she dipped her head into something between a nod and a bow, mumbling, “Yes, sir.”

His hands found a space between plates of armor where she could feel his fingers gently squeeze her skin. “This is a thank you, Ingrid,” he said quietly. “For everything you do. Please take it easy. You’ve earned your rest.”

The cranking chains of the chandelier finally ceased, and its lights filled Ingrid’s eyes when she gave him a small smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout to anyone who appreciated my musical rambling, especially the bit about trumpets in the beginning. my partner and i are both classically-trained musicians and we burst out laughing the first time we played the battle of eagle & lion and saw the monastery trumpeters somehow playing a melody in a minor key on natural horns. sometimes it's the small things you've got to write fix-it fics for.
> 
> warning to anybody who didn't care for the musical rambling: i feel the goddess in this opera house tonight and there is going to be so much more where that came from


	5. No Rest for the Wretched

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a lot more comic relief in this chapter than the title would imply.

Byleth found out, while trying to set up that first guard, that Shamir and her archers were already positioned in the shadows all around the opera house and in the city streets beyond. If he believed himself able to find her to thank her, he would have. As it was, he settled for trying to make some other hard workers finally take a break.

“Dedue is here with him,” he said quietly.

Gilbert cast his sad, tired eyes downward at the floor of the narrow hall he was haunting, standing under the golden plaque engraved with _BOX 4_.

“Dedue and I are _both_ here,” Byleth tried.

“I couldn’t call myself a knight,” Gilbert stated, “if I left my King’s side while he was in such a state as this.”

“They need help cooking downstairs,” Byleth said, then, like an accusation: “You love cooking.”

Gilbert shifted his stance. Byleth let his eyebrows rise a fraction of an inch, tilting his head in anticipation.

“Please send word immediately if his condition changes,” Gilbert all but blurted, using a bow to duck under eye contact as he hurried down to the stairs.

When curtained off from the outside on both sides, the box was dark as a moonlit night. Byleth moved slowly to let his eyes adjust and find the edges of shapes in the dim. Dedue had carefully arranged two chairs and their footstools in a row to create a narrow bed on which to lay the sleeping prince, a narrow thing without all his armor. His chest was half-bared under an unbuttoned undershirt, wet with sweat and pulled back to expose the wound in his shoulder, to which Dedue pressed a rag likely more soaked with blood than water at this point. The sheen of sweat on Dimitri’s face caught what little light crept through to the box and Byleth realized that Dedue had taken off his eyepatch—and it was such a small thing, next to the stack of armor carefully removed from his arms, legs, hands, and chest, but it felt so intimate, like something Byleth would never be able to touch, that Dedue knew Dimitri so well that he would— _could_ —had likely done it many times before.

“They need help cooking downstairs,” Byleth said again, but his heart was not in it.

“I must stay by His Highness’s side,” Dedue said, as expected, but not before a small pause.

“I’m here to watch over him.”

He wondered if Gilbert would come racing back upstairs if he found out Byleth had plied him out of position with a false promise, should he see Dedue end up in the kitchen along with him. At least, for a short while, they could both have their break.

“Would you like to be alone with His Highness?” Dedue asked, low and solemn, knowing much more than he should, and knowing it personally.

“I want you to do something you enjoy to keep you from worrying about him for a little while,” Byleth said instead, but not before a small pause.

Dedue’s profile stood black against the burgundy of the curtains behind him, glowing from the light of the chandelier on the other side. His forehead sloped down to his nose, and his nose pointed to His Highness. There was a silent conversation there, one-sided—if Byleth did not know Dedue better, he could have called it a prayer—then Dedue raised his head to his professor. “His Highness’s shoulder wound has been aggravated,” he said. “I have given the appropriate dosings of healing drinks, but I would feel more comfortable leaving His Highness in the hands of an experienced healer.”

Having discovered the benefits firsthand of knowing enough white magic to cast a lifesaving spell, Byleth had made sure many of his Blue Lions studied a bit of faith if they showed any spark with reason. Annette, Sylvain, and Felix were all subjected to this torture, but none of them were what anyone could call an experienced healer, nor was Byleth himself. The only one here who fit that description was Mercedes.

“Thank you, Dedue,” Byleth said, retreating with a small smile. “I’ll return soon. Take care.”

He was immediately delayed upon leaving, however, by the sounds floating into the narrow hallway from the adjacent Box 2. The first was a yelp so small and soft that Byleth did not recognize the voice behind it. “Slow down, Felix,” was the hiss afterwards. “And don’t pull so hard. Twist it a little bit, yeah. Like that.”

Byleth lifted the curtain to the sound of another tiny cry, half agony and half relief. Melting out of a chair with its back to the professor and gripping the armrests white-knuckled, Sylvain was flushed and half-stripped of his armor. A pair of kneeling legs in front of the chair were most of what could be seen of Felix, especially with one of Sylvain’s knees hooked over his shoulder. His face and his hands hid deeper, below Sylvain’s waist.

“Hm,” said Byleth, loudly, of the scene.

Sylvain rolled his head back to see the intruder and managed a strained smile. “Hey, professor,” he said, “any chance you can— _agh!_ ”

His entire body jerked up, then cringed inward towards his wound. Felix sat back on his heels, wearing that crisply unlined face of his that signified satisfaction, and held up a bloody plate of armor freed from Sylvain’s thigh.

“At what cost?” Sylvain demanded, kicking at Felix’s hand and missing. “At what _cost_?!”

“I’ll leave you to it,” Byleth said, slowly backing out of the box with a small upturn to his lips.

“Professor, _save_ me,” Sylvain begged, throwing out an arm over the back of the chair towards the lowering curtain.

Byleth had all intentions of taking pity and returning to help with the armor, until he heard the soft thumping of too much flesh against the floor from the direction of the stairwell. Felix and Sylvain both lifted their heads and went very still when Byleth snapped his gaze down the hall towards the sound. He had learned to wait a moment after such a crash for Annette’s voice to ring out either with an upbeat “I’m okay!” or with the tirade of a creatively censored sailor against whatever obstruction had the audacity to stand in her path, no in-between. Hearing neither was alarming.

It was Mercedes that Byleth found with her arms hooked around the balusters of the railing beside the stairs she had been climbing, trying to pull her uncooperative legs back under her. She looked up with eyes like a cornered deer’s when Byleth shoved open the door to the stairwell, startled into saying, “Oh! Professor,” but her face was dazed and pale.

There were at least four stairs between Mercedes and the door. Somehow Byleth was by her side in a single stride. His voice came out with tremors he did not know it capable of when he said her name, sliding gentle arms around her for support.

“Please don’t worry, I’m alright,” Mercedes said, warming the room with her smile. “I was just feeling a bit unwell down in the kitchen, and, well…”

“You should have sat down. Told someone,” Byleth said. Of all the worrying over his students he had done that day, nothing shook him more than Mercedes lying weak in his arms. “Were you wounded?”

“No, nothing serious. I think I’m a bit exhausted, that’s all,” she insisted. “I wanted to… You know I always feel a bit better when I use my healing magic, so I thought I would come help Dimitri and Sylvain and Felix.”

Byleth narrowed his eyes. She was not wrong about her healing magic. It was within the first month of the school year that he had watched wounds close on her arms when she was casting a spell for someone else. He had gotten used to the spectacle, even accounted for it in his strategies, but, as he repeated, “You’re exhausted.”

Mercedes did not plead with him often, but when she did, it was like this: silent, doe-eyed, yet determined, with the resolute knowledge that even if someone tried to stop her, she would use those hands meant to heal to claw her way forward.

“I’ll take you to Dimitri,” Byleth relented, cradling her closer, ready to lift.

“Oh! No, no, I can walk, professor, my knees just locked up for a moment—”

He set her back down only once he had carried her safely to the top of the stairs. Her knees were still locked, by the looks of it; she had to give one of her legs a stubborn kick in order to straighten it out enough to stand on. Their arms twisted around each other at the elbows and clutched at the hands to support her as she stumbled slowly up the walk. Somehow, she was even worse for wear than Felix, who had himself propped up in the arch outside his box to see into the hall.

As he always did when he was worried, his face curled into a snarl of rage, even when there was no one responsible for the situation for him to kill to make things right. “Mercedes,” he said, deep-throated and menacing.

“You should be resting, Felix,” Byleth said sternly.

Behind Felix, half-armored movement rustled inside Box 2. “Mercedes?” echoed Sylvain with sudden panic.

“I’m alright, I’m alright!” she laughed, but her breaths were too ragged to convince anyone. If either of the boys could walk without help, they would be swarming her in seconds. The only thing stopping Felix from trying was that Dedue emerged from next door and instantly came to Mercedes’s other side. Her giggles floated up and her feet floated beneath her as she held onto the arms of the “two strong young men,” as she teasingly called them.

They sat her gently in the chair beside Dimitri, its seat still warm from Dedue’s presence. Byleth touched a candlewick with a spark of magic to light it, but Mercedes could already see by the light glowing in her palms as she healed. Where Dimitri’s chest was not sticky with blood, it glowed with sweat under the light, shimmering as it rose and fell. Byleth found himself counting the movements, trying to time it against his own breathing, wondering if it were too slow for a man unconscious, but that just made him unable to breathe normally, either.

He stared for so long that he was not sure whether or not he was imagining the bloody gash receding as new skin crawled slowly over it from the outside in. His eyes burned when he forced himself to blink, like his eyelids were scraping over the dryness. He held his eyes closed with his hands and rubbed to revitalize them. The wound was definitely smaller than he had last seen it when he opened his eyes again. A small while later, Mercedes inhaled slow and quiet as she leaned away from her patient, her hands going dark. She let the air go in a heavy sigh when she touched against the back of the chair.

“Feeling better?” Byleth asked quietly, afraid of the answer.

She did not give one for a thoughtful moment. “I’m not sure,” she finally murmured. “But… I do feel better using magic now that I’ve had a break. I’d like to try helping Sylvain and Felix, too.”

Byleth held out his arm to help her to her feet. She put just as much weight in his hand as before. Dedue joined them again as soon as he saw the struggle.

“Don’t force it,” they heard Sylvain saying when they stepped out into the hall. “Easy. You’re gonna kill me if you go too fast.”

“I can’t—see what I’m doing,” Felix grunted in reply. “Turn over.”

“Turn over? You’re telling me this _now_?” Sylvain gave a scoff of a laugh. “I can’t just _turn over_ while you’re halfway up my—”

“Then spread your legs wider. I can’t get in there.”

“That’s as wide as they go, dude—”

Dedue lifted the curtain to Box 2. Sylvain had moved, though his chair had not, and he was still gripping its armrests with white knuckles, face flushed and strained. He stood bent over it, legs straight and feet far apart, with Felix standing directly behind him, hands reaching around Sylvain’s hips and down to the groin.

“Hm,” said Dedue, Mercedes, and Byleth all together.

Felix glanced up in brief acknowledgement. Sylvain opened his eyes, still wincing, and said, “Hey, Merce, you doing alri—”

Felix pulled back with a jerk and a grunt, and Sylvain screamed something foul. Felix stumbled backward into the wall behind him, then held up a bloody piece of armor from Sylvain’s hip like a third-place trophy.

“You have _got_ ,” Sylvain panted, crumpling to one knee and faceplanting into the chair, “to stop doing that.”

“If you’re going to get yourself wounded, wear armor that’s less complicated to take off,” Felix retorted, dropping the plate unceremoniously to the ground.

“Learn how to take off armor correctly!” Sylvain shot back, but he was laughing as he scrabbled his way back up into the chair.

Mercedes started with his thigh wound. He slouched low in his seat and swung his leg into her lap when she pulled up a chair by her side, winning airy laughs out of her with that and other gestures, along with his idle banter. Meanwhile Dedue, who very much did know how to take armor off correctly, unbuckled and released the scant remaining pieces of Sylvain’s battlewear, so gently that Sylvain did not seem to notice.

Byleth spent that time helping Felix out of the mess of his own outer layers and the punctured leathers beneath it, looking for fresh bloodstains. The red on his torso was all faded to rust brown, but a brighter color had blossomed at the top of his sleeve underneath his mangled pauldron. Whether it was a testament to his personal growth or the lingering wooziness of ingesting a copious amount of strong potions exacerbated by bloodloss, Byleth did not know, but Felix was compliant—albeit tense and scowling—with Byleth’s hands skimming his clothes for buckles, buttons, and straps, and gently peeling them away, until he was down to his trousers and sleeveless turtleneck. He winced trying to look at the half-gushing hole on the outside of his shoulder and settled for pulling his arm closer to him by the elbow.

“Oh, no, don’t walk on it yet,” Mercedes said, suddenly a bit louder than she had been speaking before. Sylvain, having half-eased himself out of his chair onto a newly patched-up leg, froze in midair, then sank back down to his seat with a guilty look. “If it opened up once before, it could do so again if you put too much strain on it. You’ll want to stay resting for at least a few hours.”

“Whatever you say, nurse,” Sylvain said with a wink.

Mercedes smiled back, but it was weak. She leaned her head back in her chair to see around Byleth, calling gently, “Felix, how are you doing?”

“It’s fine,” Felix muttered.

Byleth did not have to say anything for Mercedes to know that it was, in fact, not fine. She pushed back to her feet with an uncertain wobble, clutching Dedue’s arm when he offered it.

“You’re still not feeling better,” Byleth realized.

Sylvain’s smile, already tinged with something like suspicion or worry from the not-quite-right sound of Mercedes’s laugh, dropped completely. He clenched the armrests, resisting the urge to rise out of his chair. Mercedes hesitated a moment before deflecting with, “I think I’ve still got a little bit left in me. Let me try helping Felix.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Felix enunciated. He was again heeded by no one. When Byleth dragged a spare footstool beside Felix’s injured shoulder, Dedue guided Mercedes towards it.

“Mercedes, you’re not feeling well?” Sylvain asked, leaning as far towards her as he could without leaving his chair. “What’s wrong?”

She waited until she was settled by Felix’s side, magic flickering to life in her palms, before answering. “I think it’s nothing a good night’s rest won’t fix,” she said. “I was lightheaded for a while, but I think that’s passed, now. I just feel a little weak and quite a bit achey. That makes sense after the day we’ve had, doesn’t it?”

“You’re sweating,” Felix said bluntly enough to startle her. “I can see it on your face by candlelight.”

She wiped the back of a hand across her forehead. “Maybe I am a little warm,” she murmured. “It’s hard to say.”

“Perspiration, fatigue, and aches could be symptoms of a fever,” Dedue warned.

Mercedes shook her head and turned back to her healing. “It doesn’t feel like a fever, I’m sure. Or, at least, it’s not like one I’ve ever known.”

“What about your knees?” Byleth asked. “Have they ever bothered you like this before?”

“Mmm… not that I can remember,” she said, then giggled softly. “Maybe my age is catching up to me.”

Felix frowned in a serious way, different from his usual scowl. “What’s wrong with your knees?”

“They just feel stiff. Maybe from all the walking and marching we’ve done lately.” She raised one of her hands, testing it with stretches and flexes. “I feel a little stiff all over. Or maybe it’s just achey, I’m not sure.”

“How… _achey_?” Felix pressed, and then it clicked for Byleth.

Mercedes cocked her head to one side. “What do you mean?”

Byleth glanced around the box. Dedue still had a furrow in his strong brow as he puzzled over the information. Sylvain’s eyes flashed wide when it struck him, and wider still when he saw Byleth looking at him, having realized the same thing.

“How strong is the pain,” Felix explained with the force in his voice that he exerted when attempting patience with someone who deserved better than his short temper. “Where do you feel it. Does it pulse. Do you feel it… originating from where you were struck by an enemy.”

Before she could answer the first of those questions, and certainly before Felix could ask yet another, Sylvain interrupted, “Mercedes, have you ever been hit with poison before?”

“Oh!” She snapped both hands, the white magic instantly extinguished from shock, to her cheeks. “You don’t think I… oh, no, there _was_ that man in dark robes who…”

“I will retrieve an antitoxin,” Dedue said immediately, racing out of the box.

“Oh, Mercie,” Sylvain exhaled, or perhaps it was “oh, mercy,” and he dissolved backward into his chair with quiet laughter.

“How long ago was that?” Felix demanded, looking all but ready to jump out of his chair if he thought he could beat the poison out of her with a sword. “How are you _alive_?”

“Hmm, I think it was near the end of the battle inside the castle,” Mercedes recollected, still with all her calm detachment. “Since then, I’ve been using my healing magic almost nonstop, up until we arrived here at the opera house, and that’s when I started feeling worse. So I guess I just kept healing myself into feeling better, but the whole time I was… Oh, dear.” She looked at her hands. “I’ve treated poison in others so many times, and I know what it feels like in someone else’s body, but I never knew what it felt like in myself!”

“Goddess, this is one for the books,” Sylvain cackled. “‘And be it written that, at the Battle of Enbarr, the incomparably beautiful Mercedes von Martritz of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus was poisoned by an enemy blade, and so good was she that she did not even notice.’ Fel, how bad were you howling when you got hit with poison that last time?”

“I got hit with an _axe_ ,” Felix snapped. “Poison was just salt in the wound. The wound, from an _axe_.”

“Maybe it was a weaker poison?” Mercedes suggested, covering her smile with a hand.

“We’ll make an announcement at dinner to watch for signs of poisoning,” Byleth said. “I’m going to check on Dimitri. Sylvain and Felix, yell for me if anything changes.” He started to retreat, stopped himself, and pointed at Mercedes. “You have to _say_ if anything changes. _Anything_.”

Mercedes stifled a giggle and nodded. Felix nudged his knee against hers so that he would see him glaring at her. She received that show of concern as the honor it was, eyes wide and warm.

“She’s in good hands, Professor,” Sylvain promised. “Go be with His Highness.”

Byleth froze again on his way out of the box as he sifted through Sylvain’s wording. He gave him a narrow-eyed stare. Sylvain replied with an easy smile and a wink.

He had experienced a number of new emotions in the years since meeting his students. This was definitely the first time he had felt this particular urge: were it not for Mercedes watching, he would have taken the opportunity to flip his very first bird at Sylvain. The sentiment must have come through in his glower, if Sylvain’s reactionary smirk was any indication.

In his chest—in all his students’ chests, if the way they kept puttering about, looking for something more to do, some other way to help, was any indication—was a smouldering ball of nerves, unfurling in the heat in cracked layers like paint and polish from burning iron. This quiet moment, in the peaceful dim, where the weary future of Fódlan lay resting, his visage unperturbed by nightmares of the past, visions of the dead, or fears of the future—this was supposed to be where that ball would bloom all its remaining layers at once like a rose under the Garland Moon, or cool and calm with a satisfying sizzle like hot steel quenched in tempering oil, or whatever its inconceivable conclusion entailed.

The flickering candlelight made dancing shadows in the prince’s face, his features now sharpened by grinding himself to the bone through his sleepless nights with a deadly mix of dedication and self-hatred. The deepest shadow lay where his right eye had been taken from him and never treated to heal. With a feather-light touch, Byleth swept the stray strands of hair from his face, combing through the minute tangles that such fine hair could collect.

The molten ball of worry, that searing thing that filled his chest instead of a heart, did not cool, did not bloom, did not change. He put one hand over his left breast, and one over Dimitri’s. Behind one hand he felt the too-foreign sensation of a human heart’s slow, steady beat. Behind the other, he was starting to feel an ache like the pain of an exhausted muscle, the weary cry of an inhuman heart that had loved too hard through too much strife and no longer knew how to stop.


	6. Dinner and a No-Show

It was either an eternity later or no time at all that the curtain rustled behind Byleth, with Dedue slowly ducking his head under the doorway. “Dinner is served in the orchestra lobby,” he reported. “I will watch over His Highness while you have your meal.”

Byleth narrowed his eyes. “And when will you have yours?”

“After,” he said firmly. “My presence was tolerated in the kitchens, but I will not force more citizens to associate with a man of Duscur during a time of repose.”

“Dedue,” Byleth said, almost before Dedue had finished speaking, already anticipating the name of his homeland to fall into this conversation as the usual excuse for his self-flagellation, “this is the Empire, not the Kingdom. If anything, you’re safer here.”

Dedue brought his arms up to his chest in an uncomfortable fold. “I have found that none of Fódlan takes kindly to outsiders.”

“Then when we build a new Fódlan, we’ll make it a country that does better than that,” Byleth said. “And we can start by bringing you to dinner with your friends and introducing you as the head chef of tonight’s meal.”

He was always stern and reticent when faced with praise. To deflect, he said, “Someone must stay with His Highness.”

“ _And_ that’ll be me,” said a bright voice from the hallway.

Sylvain sauntered in under Dedue’s raised arm holding the curtain, leaning his weight upon a gnarled wooden staff to keep each step off of his recuperating leg. With his other hand, he gestured for Byleth to rise from the chair by Dimitri’s makeshift bedside so that he might take that place.

“Neat, right?” he said of his cane, wiggling it about in the air once he had fallen with a sigh into his new seat. “Annette brought it up to me. Said she found it in a storage room for props and stuff. Mercedes okayed it as long as I keep off the stairs, so, I’m stuck up here anyway.”

“What about Felix?” Byleth asked.

He cocked his head towards the adjacent box with a fond smirk. “You should go see for yourself,” he said. “I asked him if he was comfortable there, and I think he said, ‘Why, do you want to sit here?’ And then… well.”

Felix had his legs hooked one over, one under the right armrest of a chair, his curved back braced against the left. His arms were tucked and folded low across his chest. Between them and his knee was where he fit his head. There was a buzz to his slow, steady breaths that could only be snoring. Tucked over him like a blanket, in a way that looked suspiciously difficult to tuck around oneself in his position and would require a second party’s interference, was his fur-lined cloak.

“Bring me up a plate after you’re done eating,” Sylvain said with a wave when Byleth stopped back into Dimitri’s box just to deliver a smile.

Good spirit reigned in the entrance hall, coming from troops and troupe alike. Despite the initial shock of their country losing the war, the opera company was composed primarily of apolitical citizens happy to celebrate their survival in any end of the war. Likewise, in perhaps ignoble fashion, the lobby was not the magnificent sight that a wealthy opera-goer would have expected a decade ago. The floor that had once been a fascinating glitter of marble and stones was now a right mess from the muddy and bloody footprints of a hundred soldiers. The chandelier was only half-lit, a stagehand struggling below it with a long torch to spread the flame to each candle. Tablecloths covered sometimes tables, sometimes upturned crates or other odds and ends, from one end of the lobby to the other, topped with platters and pots steaming and smelling of everything from Dagda and Brigid’s warm-weather fruits to North Faerghus and Duscur’s spices. The artisan glass and amber liquids of top-shelf liquor shimmered as it came from the shelves by the hands of the house’s bartenders and poured into the glasses of any who approached the small bar tucked against the back of the lobby.

Before Byleth had enough time to take in all of the sights of people milling about the buffet, Ashe came darting out of the cover of crowd, calling, “There you are!” not to the professor, but to Dedue. “I was worried you were going to skip out on the feast to watch over His Highness,” he said, then turned his bright, warm eyes to Byleth. “But you made him come back down and eat, didn’t you, professor? Come on, Dedue, someone was asking about the stew you made, I want to introduce you—”

The fingertips and thumbs of two hands stretched around Dedue’s upper arm could not meet each other around such impressive girth, so it was not with much force that Ashe pulled him along. Dedue followed anyway, his face settled into the calm expression of his that came closest to a smile.

Though the smells wafting through the air seemed like divine blessings from the heavens after hours of battle, Byleth found his place among the soldiers and singers by first following his ears, not his nose. Dorothea’s voice sailed higher than the aromas, reverberating across marble and stained glass, as it soared through that melody of hers again. He spotted her leaning against the bar, singing to bide her time as she waited for her drink.

Ingrid found her at about the same time Byleth did. “You sound like you’re in better spirits,” she said, sliding into the limited space next to Dorothea and tapping the bar for the nearest tender’s attention like a seasoned patron of the rowdiest taverns.

Before Dorothea could respond, let alone before Ingrid could give her drink order, the tall figure on her other side barked a laugh into half a glass of amber and ice. “Hardly,” they said, in a lower pitch than their long, silvering curls and flowing clothes would have suggested. Rather than elaborate, they drained the rest of their glass and set it back on the bar for a refill.

With all of her unusual height, Dorothea imposed herself between Ingrid and the stranger, not sparing them a moment of eye contact. “It’s been a rough night,” she sighed, “but seeing everyone coming together to eat and celebrate… That makes it a little better.”

Ingrid offered her a bittersweet smile. She started to move her hand closer to where Dorothea’s rested on the bar, but stopped in the middle of the motion to examine her nails instead. “There’s so much food,” she said. “I didn’t even know there would be a kitchen at all in an opera house, let alone one that could feed this many people so quickly.”

“Oh, yes, it’s a necessity,” Dorothea replied. “Did you know there are operas where the music _alone_ lasts over five hours? So we have long intermissions where we serve everyone dinner. And no one else in the world other than _Yarrow_ here”—she cast a disparaging look over her shoulder at the stranger behind her, equally as teasing as it was threatening—“has every note memorized, so they should be _nice_ if somebody thinks Isolde’s Love-Death sounds happy out of context, because _obviously_ it would.”

Yarrow did not receive Dorothea’s mean look; their attention was on the short staff behind the bar. “It’s only three and a half hours of music. Four if the singers are milking it too much,” they corrected. “And it’s the most famous motif of the most renowned aria of the most popular opera by the most influential opera composer of the century. I’d expect it to at least ring a bell with your average noble.” They arched an eyebrow at Ingrid, who stood ruffled by the whirlwind of unfamiliar words swirling around her.

“In the Empire, maybe.” Dorothea turned from facing Ingrid to lean into Yarrow’s space, placing her hand over the mouth of their glass before a bartender could grab it. “It’s written in an Adrestian dialect that you wouldn’t know unless you grew up here, or you studied it. The whole story is mired in Adrestian culture that just doesn’t resonate with any other country. Wagner was influential, sure, but only in two spheres: the musical world, and the nobility of the Empire. Everywhere else couldn’t care less that he kicked the bucket a few years ago.”

“He died in the war?” Byleth asked.

He thought he had been hovering in the conversation with more presence, but all three turned in surprise at the sound of his voice. “Professor!” Dorothea greeted, lifting her hand to beckon him closer. “The guest of honor of the night. Have you gotten food? Or did you want a drink first?”

“He died of old age,” Yarrow muttered into their glass—still empty, but they sucked the ice-melt for any last drops of alcohol.

“Yes, and you thought the funeral was lousy, because all of the Empire’s wealth was going towards the war, we _know_ , Yarrow, we’ve heard it a thousand times,” Dorothea droned, waving them off.

Yarrow leveled her with a glare, then turned it to the professor. “You’re the leader of the new empire, aren’t you?” they said. “Are you going to make it any different? Are you going to suck the land dry of art, culture, and music so you can fund your gentlemen’s wars, your political chess matches that negotiate legislature at the cost of people’s lives?”

In the middle of that tirade, Ingrid had finally gotten hold of a bartender. Byleth could not hear what she was saying, but she seemed to glance at Yarrow, then change her drink order to something stronger.

“You are insufferable,” Dorothea huffed. “Professor—well, we’re meeting as two adults now, not as student and teacher, right? So… beer? Whiskey? Tell me your poison.”

Instead of naming a drink, he blurted, “Mercedes,” and scanned the room for her.

“Aw, that’s so sweet!” Dorothea gushed. “So she’s the lucky girl who won the professor’s heart?”

Ingrid almost lost the first sip of the dark beer the bartender had just handed her, but she choked it down. Byleth left her to clear up the misunderstanding in his stead, perhaps after she had stopped coughing, having spotted the flutter of the veil from the back of Mercedes’s hat. She lingered a little behind Ashe and Dedue, the former gesturing to the latter animatedly as his mouth ran a mile a minute speaking to the small crowd of youngsters impressed by either Dedue’s stature or his cooking, or both.

Mercedes’s plate was more filled with sweets than anything substantial. When she saw the professor approaching, she tried some sleight of hand to sneak an entire pastry into her mouth as an attempt to correct the ratio. Unfortunately, the evidence had not had the time to vanish completely before the professor came to speak to her.

“Feeling better?” he asked, and offered her a thumbs-up as a suggestion for how to answer his question without speaking.

She nodded, trying to smile around what was much too large a mouthful for her, and then ducked shamefully behind her thumbs up. Byleth smiled, gave her a pat on the shoulder, and turned back to the bar. Dorothea and Ingrid, having both received their drinks—Dorothea’s was something tall that changed from a lighter to a warmer brown between the top and the bottom—were on their way to meet him at the buffet table. Dorothea was humming her lilting tune again.

“So, Mercedes,” she said, still singsong, “when’s the wedding?”

While Mercedes, flushed, scrambled to chew and swallow while shaking her head, Ingrid elbowed Dorothea. “I was trying to tell you, Dorothea, they’re not—”

“We haven’t even agreed to start courting yet,” Mercedes protested.

Ingrid and Byleth both blinked in surprise at her. There was a beat of silence.

Then she, too, blinked in surprise. “Wait a moment, who told you?” she asked.

“I heard it from the professor himself,” Dorothea said, raising her eyebrows at Byleth. She frowned when she saw his bewildered expression.

“Professor, how did _you_ find out?” Mercedes gasped, and Dorothea frowned even more.

“He didn’t find out anything, Dorothea’s just getting carried away. But Mercedes,” Ingrid said, now just as singsong as Dorothea had been, and with just as conspiratorial a grin, “who _are_ you planning on courting with?”

“Oh,” said Mercedes, turning an even deeper shade of red. She held a hand over her cheek to shield some of the color.

Byleth raised an eyebrow at Ingrid. “I’m surprised you have to ask,” he said.

“Maybe I don’t, but it’ll be fun to make her say it,” Ingrid replied.

“Oh, you two,” Mercedes whined pitifully, turning her flaming face to the floor. “Please don’t say anything about this to anyone else—she hasn’t even accepted yet. It’s nothing official.”

“ _She?_ ” Dorothea repeated, eyes wide with a different, deeper interest than before. “Oh, Mercedes, do you mean to say you’re…”

Mercedes looked up with an innocent smile, cocking her head. “Oh? Didn’t you know?” she said. “In fact, just a couple of years ago, Ingrid and I—”

“Mercedes!” It was Ingrid’s turn to go red in the face. “I thought we—you said we wouldn’t—”

“Ingrid?” Dorothea said, too softly for the apparent ex-lovers to hear. Her interest went even deeper. “You, too?”

“Oh, I know what we said.” Mercedes’s smile had turned into something more venomous than whatever had struck her in the castle some hour ago. “I just thought I’d remind you that I have some secrets of yours that I might spill if you accidentally spilled some of mine!”

Ingrid jabbed Mercedes in the side with the elbow of the hand holding her beer. “You’re ruthless, you know,” she huffed, stomping away to start a heaping plate of meats and greens from the buffet table. Mercedes just giggled into her hand as she went.

“I am learning a lot about my students today,” said Byleth, not even bothering to coax his voice out of its natural monotone for that remark.

It had the effect he thought it might, startling Mercedes into turning around and realizing he held both Ingrid’s secret and hers, with no collateral exposed. “Oh, professor, you won’t say anything about Ingrid and me, will you?” she all but pleaded. “It really does embarrass her quite a bit, and we’ve wanted to put it behind us and stay good friends without any awkwardness—”

“You did well,” Byleth admitted. “I had no idea.”

“Even though we came back to the monastery with matching haircuts?”

Byleth blinked. He looked at the delicate edge of Mercedes’s hair, hitting the back of her neck at exactly the same height as Ingrid’s.

“You,” he faltered, gesturing in a circle to the back of his head, “wear a hat.”

Dorothea, bless her soul, burst into laughter so raucous that it lured Ashe and Dedue their way and forced a change in topic. When Ingrid returned from the buffet balancing a heaping plate on top of a soup bowl, cradling it protectively with the arm clutching her drink, the five students lapsed into such easy conversation that Byleth felt the need to slip away, lest he ruin it with his presence somehow. He lingered over the buffet table, alternately assembling a dinner plate and sating his hunger by moving food directly from the table to his mouth.

At the end of the table, he came across the same lean figure from the bar, holding both plate and refilled glass in the same sprawling grasp as they picked over the available food. There was no meat on their plate; they were picking around cuts of it to pilfer more vegetables.

“So what was that opera about?” he asked Yarrow.

Yarrow glanced up, gave Byleth a once-over as if refreshing their memory as to who he was, and rolled their eyes. “Star-crossed lovers,” they said. “The _Liebestod_ is the consummation of love by death. It’s represented by a cadence that’s set up in the first chord of the overture and doesn’t resolve until the final aria, three acts later. In other words, it’s musical torture.” Yarrow had about as much ability to smile as Byleth when he had been midway through the academic year at Garreg Mach. They cast their small joy, something less on their lips and more in their eyes, up at high ceilings glowing warm and flickering with candlelight. “It’s heartwrenching genius.”

Byleth did not know enough about music or consummation of love (or, really, emotions at all) to respond to that with anything but a dumb nod. Yarrow glanced his way and lost any joy that had once been in their eyes.

“You never answered _my_ question, you know,” they said.

He remembered it. “About whether I’d choose war over culture?”

After they settled their fork onto their plate with a few more spears of buttery asparagus, they separated plate from glass into their two hands and took another swig from the glass. “That’s the one,” they said in a voice rasped by burning drink.

“I’d never choose war over anything,” Byleth said.

“Liar,” Yarrow said nonchalantly, settling the plate and glass back into one hand again. “You chose war over submission. You fought for peace, but you _fought_. You may have won this war, but there’ll be rebellion in the Empire against you and the Faerghus king. And even if the three nations of Fódlan are unified in holy matrimony like some idealistic fairy tale, there’s Brigid and Dagda across the sea, there’s Almyra to the east, Sreng to the north…” They sampled a bite of one of Mercedes’s pastries, wrinkled their nose, and dropped the half-eaten thing onto the edge of their plate with disdain. “You’ll choose war again. You’ll have to.”

Byleth shook his head, firm and confident. “There is a survivor from Duscur in our army who is… very important to me,” he said. “I promised him that the new Fódlan will be one that is kind to foreigners. I won’t let him down, so I won’t let you down, either.”

“I still trust your past actions more than your present promises,” Yarrow said.

As soon as Mercedes said, “There you are, Professor! Is this a friend of yours?” Byleth got a sense of déjà-vu powerful enough that he already knew what to say next, and what Mercedes would say after that.

“I don’t know this person,” he said.

Yarrow rolled their eyes into their drink. “Yarrow. Zinnia Yarrow,” they said curtly. “Assistant director of music, slash part-time stage manager, slash substitute conductor-pianist of Mittelfrank. I do what needs doing.”

With all her earnest charm, Mercedes smiled at them. “It sounds like you do a whole lot,” she said. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

“Prove that you aren’t just quartering here to leech us of our resources, and that you actually care about the opera company beyond being friends with Dorothea.”

Yarrow was not looking for a response to that. If their sharp tone did not say it clearly enough, their turned back drove it home. Neither of those things would stop Mercedes from trying just a bit more.

“Hmm, do you think we could help you put on a performance?” she wondered, and it at least made Yarrow turn back around to listen. “Nothing too complicated—I know it takes a lot of time and rehearsal to put on a whole opera, but maybe we could have people perform a song or two? Something like that might boost morale and bring everyone together.”

“The _Liebes_ …” Byleth forgot how the foreign word went. “The song Dorothea keeps singing.”

Yarrow snarked a laugh, already starting to turn away again. “Do you know the sheer number of musicians Wagner scores in his operas?” they said. “There’s no way we’ve got the personnel left to fill out the seats. There are only a handful of singers in the whole world who are born with the kind of voice that can sing over an orchestra of that size, and Dorothea Arnault is—or _was_ —one of them. Who knows if she still is, or if she damaged her voice playing Isolde when she was too young for a role that big.”

Mercedes did not follow when Yarrow sauntered off, and Byleth was certainly not about to go it alone. “I think Yarrow is just like that,” he said quietly to her as reassurance.

“Maybe they just need some time,” Mercedes murmured. “No use dwelling on it, professor. Have you gotten enough to eat? The rest of us were wondering where you went.”

Byleth glanced down at his heaping plate, then over at where the cluster of his students had been. They were slowly but steadily dispersing back into the crowd: Ashe a natural socialite despite his shyness, Dorothea introducing Ingrid to her friends, even Dedue branching out on his own with a smile on his face because he lived for the ambient joy of celebration even if he had few words to exchange with those around him—

Sylvain, Felix, and Dimitri upstairs. Mercedes beside him. Byleth was counting on his fingers, then counting out Dorothea, and…

“Mercedes, not to bring this back up on purpose, I promise,” he said, “but where _is_ Annette?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dorothea: it’s in an old adrestian dialect  
> real world people reading this fic: it’s german? do you mean fucking german?

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on twitter @meataphor if this fic made you think, "Man, would love to see what completely non-FE-related garbage this guy shitposts about in his spare time."
> 
> Follow me on tumblr @airdeari if this fic made you think, "I'd love to see this guy reblog FE3H art for the next few weeks and then gradually phase it out in favor of his usual fair of memes."
> 
> However, if this fic made you think, "I want to see what else this person has written," I regret to inform you that you will first have to play at least one, but ideally all three of the visual novel puzzle games in the cult classic trilogy Zero Escape.


End file.
